This week the poverty tsar Frank Field lost faith in the coalition's commitment to reducing poverty and the recently departed health minister, Paul Burstow, cast public doubt on the government's intention to do anything to reform care for the elderly. "Caring conservatism", like "vote blue, go green" and "we're all in this together", disappeared in a twitch of George Osborne's eyebrow. It's like a dysfunctional 50s marriage, this government – and not between the jackbooted Tories and the distressed Lib Dems, but rather between the Treasury and everybody else.

It is functionally impossible to reduce child poverty at the same time as freezing child benefit, reducing housing benefit, cutting the maternity grant, reducing childcare subsidies, freezing and in some cases cutting working family tax credits. It can't be done. Likewise, it is meaningless to state a commitment to Sure Start at the same time as removing the ringfence round its funding. The money is now 11% less. Last year 250 children's centres were at risk of closure; 124 have already closed; 2,000 were offering less; 1,000 had issued redundancy notices. So to have a poverty tsar in the first place is like wearing a nipple tassel in a gale, and Field should have known this rather than colluding with it for 28 months.

But there is a deeper question here about having a policy on families, and on child poverty at all, regardless of whether or not this particular government has one (it doesn't). If it only works during a period of growth, is that worthwhile? If it's really just to stick a fresh face on the gnarly (though, in my view, sage) idea of redistribution, is that honest and, more to the point, workable?

Clem Henricson is a social policy analyst whose work at the National Family and Parenting Institute was crucial to the New Labour years (which isn't to say they always did what she said). She has now written A Revolution in Family Policy, in which she becomes the second person (the first was Ed Balls) I've heard aver that Sure Start was the defining achievement of New Labour. A pincer movement of the Iraq war and the banking crisis has led to a general consensus that the last government just made a mess. It's time to reject that analysis a little more red-bloodedly, since it feeds into the egregious story that we're totally out of cash, which is what allows the Treasury to wear the trousers in the first place.

But for all the good points of the Early Years strategy, Henricson illuminates the ways – philosophical and practical – in which it could be bettered. Assuming that this government doesn't manage to destroy the infrastructure and aspiration completely, there's still life in family policy, both on its own terms – to improve the lives of families – and beyond, to improve the way governance is done.

Henricson's central critique of the last government is that its aspirations "were about changing social relations generally, which they couldn't fulfil. They addressed child poverty with the short-term measures of taxation and benefit, rather than actually trying to address the structural inequalities."

The last government did redistribute, but the way it did it, on the quiet, slipping it into the children's metaphorical bookbags, landed us here: with a minimum wage that is nowhere near a living wage. The inequalities between employer and employee are striking, and have many more causes than the working family tax credit. But that effectively scotched the idea, previously taken as given, that one works in order to make a living. New Labour enabled families to work for less than a living, and made up the difference. The coalition seeks to remove the difference and see what happens. It's not going to be pretty, but in fairness, there's another lesson to be learned from this era of British politics: don't vote for people who use the word "bloodbath" like it's a good thing.

Henricson, with an academic calm, points out that you can see the point of using short-term methods to tackle inequality; childhood is short. You can blow a lot of people's chances, waiting for wage negotiations to erode inequality. Nevertheless, if you want to have a conversation about equality, then have it on adult terms, not in terms of mobility and life chances and babies who can grow up to be whatever they want with the right interventions.

A more practical point is the focus on "outcomes". Early intervention was always sold on the promise that for every pound spent on parenting support, x pounds could be saved on the children who didn't grow up delinquent or drug-addicted or otherwise economically unproductive. This was taken up with alacrity by the current government, and has become, over time, a conversation about "troubled families", a nebulous grouping that is defined by deprivation but then discussed as though it's a euphemism for criminality.

Targeting families, whether to help them or demonise them (almost always the same thing) doesn't work. What was so good about Sure Start was that it was for everybody, and everybody used it – yet how would you put a price on that outcome? The answer is to stop trying. You can't do a cost-benefit analysis on offering support for all parents; you have to do it because you believe in it as a function of society. Politics has capitulated for too long to this idea of evaluating outcomes, when in fact, with Sure Start and so much else, the bits that work can't be counted, and the bits that can be counted don't really work.